Leelah Alcorn, 3 years later: update on the transgender revolution

Zay Crawford felt trapped in a boy’s body at a young age. With puberty fast approaching, she got an implant that suppressed the puberty process. This is the story of one family’s journey to acceptance and understanding of their 12 year-old daughter.
The Enquirer/Meg Vogel

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Gavin Grimm and Zay Crawford pose for a portrait during "Community in Action: Caring for Our Transgender Children and Youth" conference at Children's Hospital Saturday, November 18, 2017. Grimm was the plaintiff in a federal transgender rights lawsuit that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Zay was part of an Enquirer story in 2015. She is a transgender teenager from Yellow Springs, Ohio.(Photo: The Enquirer/Meg Vogel)Buy Photo

Because of Leelah Alcorn and other pioneers, trans is in. In politics, in government, in medicine, in the military. In schools. In homes on suburban cul-de-sacs.

In the three years since Leelah’s death by suicide on Dec. 28, 2014, momentum has accelerated for the transgender social revolution in the United States. Transgender people and the people who call themselves allieshave taken as a rallying cry two words out of the last social-media post from the 17-year-old transgender girl: “Fix society.”

A judge in Hamilton County is considering the request of a teenage transgender boy who seeks medical care to transition his gender but whose parents object on religious grounds. In the note she left behind, Leelah said she had despaired that her parents had pressed her into Christian therapy to change sexual orientation or gender identity.

On Dec. 11, the Lakota Local School Board, governing the state’s eighth-largest district, voted 3-2 against creating a formal policy governing gender identity and expression. The board members who voted no said they realize a policy is a good idea, but they wanted more time to craft the language. Proponents promised to renew their request next month.

In November, experts from across the nation at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center for a conference on transgender children’s health and wellbeing. The keynote speaker was Gavin Grimm, the transgender man who took a case against a Virginia “bathroom bill” to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But the work of fixing society is long. As of Nov. 30, at least 27 transgender men and woman, many of them African-American, were murdered this year across the United States. In Ohio and Kentucky, a transgender person can still be fired or evicted because of gender identity.

President Donald Trump tried to impose a new ban on transgender people in the military. The Pentagon, however, will permit them to serve, although that decision is in court. Several states, most notably North Carolina, enacted “bathroom bills” to govern who uses which lavatory.

Issue brought to the suburbs

The 16,000-student Lakota district, in Butler County, seems an unlikely laboratory for transgender equality. Trump carried Butler County in 2016 with a 61 percent majority. Yet of 15 speakers who addressed Lakota’s school board Dec. 11, only two expressed opposition to enacting a policy. The 13 others – parents, teachers, adult and teenage friends, dressed in white in solidarity – said student safety shouldn’t be a matter of one sympathetic administrator but of all Lakota schools.

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Butler County is adjacent to Warren County, where Leelah Alcorn lived and died. Research shows that 41 percent of transgender youth make a suicide attempt; the number for all Americans is 4.6 percent.

Those numbers motivated a group of Lakota parents with transgender children, who discovered the district had no official gender-identity policy and accommodated students case by case. Linda Nix, the mother of a transgender child, said lack of a policy puts transgender students at the mercy of individual administrators or teachers. Bullying hasn’t disappeared, she said, “and (enacting a policy) really is a matter of keeping all kids safe.”

“This is not the end,” Nix said after the losing school board vote. “We’ll come back.”

‘Tip of the iceberg’

Dr. Lee Ann Conard, clinic director, said Leelah Alcorn’s death marked a realization in many parents that transgender people know who they are as children - and the lifelong struggle against stigma, even taboo, can be fatal.

Families are coming to the clinic sooner, “and we meet them where they are,” Conard said. “There’s a misconception that we start hormones yesterday. That isn’t what we do. And I don’t think families understand that.”

Conard is a key witness in the Juvenile Court case on the transgender boy’s desire for medical treatment, and she declined to comment. But what she did say is that the field of transition medicine has expanded almost geometrically since she opened the clinic in 2013 with one half-day a week. Four years later, the clinic runs eight to nine half-day sessions a week and has seen 850 patients. “Tip of the iceberg,” Conard said.

“In the immediate aftermath of Leelah’s death in 2015, I think that families who were on the fence suddenly realized, 'oh, something bad could happen to our child, let’s go and look into this a little bit.' ”

Conard said she’s also noticed one change in the past three years. “When I got out to speak, I don’t have to give what I call ‘the Trans 101’ speech,” she said. “People understand a little bit better what transgender is. We’re onto the next step. That’s kind of what our conference was about. How do we support families? How do we help teacher and educators interact with these children?”

Going to the voters

A significant measure of the movement’s rising visibility came in last month’s elections. Eight transgender candidates won seats for school boards and city councils – including one in Doraville, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta with a population under 10,000.

The most notable winner: Danica Roem, who won a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates campaigning for better roads. She defeated incumbent Bob Marshall, who wrote legislation that would have banned transgender people from using restrooms aligning with gender identity in government buildings, including schools.

At least 10 transgender candidates are running for Congress in 2018, including dentist Laura Ann Weaver of College Hill, who is running for the Democratic nomination to run against U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Westwood. Boxes of campaign literature line a wall of Weaver's house. Her campaign headquarters is her dining room table.

Weaver, the author of “Pink Dawn Rising,” a gender-transition memoir, said she decided to get into politics in 2015, shortly after Leelah's death, when Indiana enacted its Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Among other things, the law gave businesses the right to discriminate against customers based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Weaver said Leelah’s death clearly shifted the political acceptance of transgender people. With the internet facilitating communication, “we’re not isolated. We’re beginning to find our political muscle. We’re beginning to find people who step forward, and they realize we’re not bad people. We don’t have to be afraid anymore.”